When I was in about the tenth or eleventh grade, I wanted very much to go to that year's graduation ceremony at my high school. In most places, this would not have posed enough of a problem that I'd be thinking about it ten years later, but I went to high school in Southern California and my school was an active participant in the overcrowding epidemic (which continues to this very day!), so due to the very high number of students graduating and the intractably finite number of seats in our school's football stadium, all graduating students were allowed only two free guests. I think that they sold tickets beyond that, but never in my life would I have willingly paid any real world currency for the privilege of watching teenagers walk in a line, unless I was planning to purchase one. I can think of no legal context in which that situation might occur.
Anyway, I would eventually skip my own high school graduation but I wanted to go to this one, and I've never been one of those people who always gets what they want, but I have a certain knack for convincing people to let me into places I shouldn't be allowed to go, so I arranged with the music teacher to allow me to sit on the football field with the orchestra for the ceremony. Now might be a good time to point out that I do not play a musical instrument.
They hid me in amongst the violin section, next to my friend Ray, and I made myself useful by turning pages, which is most likely to say that I may have turned a page for him one time. Mostly I just hid behind his music stand and made catty remarks about how nobody looked good in their graduation robes. Seriously. Our town was nothing but Latinos and Armenians--olive complexions. Who picked purple as a school color?
I will tie this back in to football, I promise. See, what with me sitting around, not playing an instrument and generally being a jackass, Ray got pretty distracted. “Pomp and Circumstance” is actually not long, as musical pieces go, and it isn't difficult either, but there were about seven hundred students graduating—no exaggeration, look it up—and that required approximately thirty or so repeats, and between me distracting him and the sheer boredom of playing the same twenty-four bars over and over, he completely lost his place in the music.
But what I always liked about Ray was that he was not one to panic. “Hang on,” he said to me, violin-benecked. “I'm just going to play E for a while.” And for the next half hour or so, he played one note on the violin and tossed out some admirably bitchy comments himself. I still don't know why I even wanted to be there that day. I must have had a crush on one of the graduating seniors or something.
My point is this: when you are utterly lost, the best thing to do is go back to a trustworthy reference point. For Ray and his violin, it was the E string. For us watching football, it needs to be the quarterback. As a football novice, you can still usually find the quarterback pretty easily—he'll be the guy standing in the middle, behind the line of other guys (I'm talking about the team of guys that are standing close together; if they're more spread out, that's defense).
What happens is, the quarterback stands behind the rest of his team, and he yells at them all what they're going to do, and then he says “Hut!” and they do it. The other team tries to stop them, but they lose points if anyone gets murdered. If the quarterback's team can go ten yards forward within four tries, they get to keep going, and they go until they run out of turns or they make it to the end of the field and score. Basically.
Have I mentioned that football is ridiculously complicated?
Anyway. If you're still having trouble figuring out which guy is the quarterback, just stay quiet for a while and wait until they start showing closeups of the players. The quarterback will have the most closeups, unless somebody else gets an injury. But if they keep showing a guy who doesn't seem to be hurt, pay attention to what number he's wearing, and as soon as they show them playing again, look for that number and then cheer. And then all the boys will be super impressed by what a cool girl you are because you're totally into football.
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